I'd like to present a brief report on the activities I manage on behalf of EGF in monitoring the rating system,
and especially in managing the data and software which comprise EGD.
EGD, as you well know, is the repository which contains the data of all tournaments played in Europe. It's a
software project initially developed by Paolo Scattini and myself, with the sponsorhip of the AGI, and has been
active since seven years so far.
At the beginning, it was fed by data processed by Ales Cieply, who founded the current European rating system
and who managed it until 2009, when I took over.
In that same year I developed the back end section of EGD, which thus changed its role: no longer a mere database
in which were stored the output data processed by Cieply, it became a completely independent system for the
managing of tournament data and for the recalculation of the GoR indicator.
In brief, this is the workflow: the organizers of individual tournaments post their results directly using the
wizard developed by me, which starts with the upload of the wall-list generated by pairing software. Uploaded
tables are put into a waiting queue; then I examine it several times per day, check one by one all new tournaments
in the queue to spot any anomalies (misspelling of names, weird grade declarations, incomplete or missing data,
inconsistent tournament class, etc.). If I find any, I contact the person who posted the data in order to resolve
the issue. When everything is fine, I confirm the tournament, which then gets into the public database, and the
system makes the recalculation of GoR for each player, according to the official algorithm.
The main pairing programs (Gerlach's Mac Mahon, Vannier's Open Gotha, Kaniuk's Go Draw, etc.) have specific
functions to access directly the EGD player database and to export result data in the standard format.
Since 2009, the number of tournaments inserted yearly into the database has increased greatly: until 2008
they were about 500/year, in 2012 they were 837, involving 7,313 unique players with 20,631 total participations.
We are talking about 70 tournaments per month!
The activities described above require from me a task for each tournament which ranges from one or two minutes,
to hours for the most difficult cases (which often require exchange of many emails with the people concerned).
Furthermore, I'm constantly engaged in maintaining the software, both bug-fixing and implementation of new
functionalities. The latest have been things such as the online GoR calculator, the chart comparison, the
winning probability tables, the API's which allow the access to the database for software developers (for
tournament booking, etc.), etc.
Also, I have to be ready to react to off-line requests coming from different sources on maintaining of data:
merging players with different names, transliteration issues, city/club recoding, fixing of mistakes in old
tournaments, etc etc.
EGD, due to its complexity, cannot reside on a standard shared hosting service. It needs to dwell on its own
Virtual Private Server (VPS), the fee for which - about €150 per year - I pay.
In the light of the continuously increasing avalability of Internet, also on the tournament sites, it's easy
to imagine several useful new features to add to EGD for the future. However, before dealing with them, we
need to understand how the EGF wants to act on the proposal from some national federations to restrict the
rating calculation only to affiliated members. In fact, it will be necessary to evaluate the software development
needed.
Aldo Podavini July 2013
web_admin@europeangodatabase.eu